clouds

Marine plankton brighten clouds over Southern Ocean From the NASA/GODDARD SPACE FLIGHT CENTER New research using NASA satellite data and ocean biology models suggests tiny organisms in vast stretches of the Southern Ocean play a significant role in generating brighter clouds overhead. Brighter clouds reflect more sunlight back into space affecting the amount of solar…

From Penn State High in the sky where the cirrus ice crystal clouds form, jet contrails draw their crisscross patterns. Now researchers have found that these elevated ice cloud trails can influence temperatures on the ground and affect local climate, according to a team of Penn State geographers. Video follows. “Research done regarding September 2001,…

Unique Sierra Wave cloud sighted over Reno, NV From my friend Mike Alger at KTVN-TV Reno, who writes: I’ve been on the air doing weather for KTVN-TV for over a quarter of a century, as you might expect (and to channel Anthony), people send me things. Especially pictures of the clouds. And some of them…

From the University of California – Santa Barbara A UCSB physicist’s experimental results disprove long-held ideas about turbulence In 1941, Russian physicist Andrey Kolmogorov developed a theory of turbulence that has served as the basic foundation for our understanding of this important naturally occurring phenomenon. Turbulence occurs when fluid flow is characterized by chaotic physical…

John McLean writes of a new paper about the pattern in global average temperature anomalies since 1950 and how they are linked to changes in cloud cover and ENSO: Key points of the paper: Indicates that the temperature pattern can be attributed to a sequence of events, namely a shift in the prevailing ENSO conditions,…

This is the second video in the TEDed / CERN series created for the TEDxCERN event held on 25 September 2014. Jasper Kirkby explains why scientists need to understand more about aerosols and clouds in order to predict the rise in the Earth’s surface temperature with more precision. The CLOUD experiment at CERN aims to…

The Hockeyschtick writes: A new paper published in the Journal of Geophysical Research Atmospheres finds Arctic sea ice concentrations at the low of each summer are related to absorption of sunlight by cloud cover at the top of the atmosphere in early summer, a phenomenon “not represented in most of current climate models.” According to…